Brian K. Vaughan's Roaring Pride

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on June 20, 2006 Sign up now!

by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/20/2006

Brian K. Vaughan has just moved to L.A. to work on screenplays based on his ongoing comics series Y the Last Man (Vertigo) and Ex Machina (WildStorm), but his forthcoming graphic novel is a very different animal. Drawn by Niko Henrichon and due from Vertigo this September, Pride of Baghdad is a fictionalized version of a true story about four lions who escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during the American bombing in 2003. PW Comics Week spoke to Vaughan about cartoon animals, politics and why Pride is unlikely to ever be a movie.

PW Comics Week: How did the news story about the Baghdad Zoo's lions coalesce into a comic?

Brian K. Vaughan: For a while, I'd wanted to do an anthropomorphized animal comic, because it was so different from anything else I was working on. There's a tradition in comics, from Scrooge McDuck to Maus, of using talking animals—it's something that's specific to comics. I'd wanted to do a story like that, and I really wanted to write about Iraq, because it was all I was thinking about at the time. So when I read the story about the zoo, it was a convergence of these things that I really wanted to experiment with. There's something about the connection we have with animals where, as a storyteller, it's an entirely different equation than dealing with humans. In movies, you can do terrible things to human beings, even children, and the audience will endure it, but if you put an animal in jeopardy, you'll lose your audience—you'll just watch people leave in droves.

PWCW: How did you end up working with Niko Henrichon?

BKV: I worked out the whole story and sent it to Vertigo, but it was sort of a challenge—there aren't a lot of animal artists working, and we didn't want it to be too Disneyfied. I wanted it to look like real animals, with a hint of emotion. It's based on a real story, and we wanted to ground it in reality, but we wanted it to be flexible enough for the animals to tell the story. [Editor Will Dennis] suggested Niko, because he'd done a graphic novel called Barnum that happened to have some animals in it, and the animals looked really good. Then Niko did some samples for Pride that were totally beyond anything he had done before—he was the only guy for the job.

PWCW: The lion characters in the book make some strong political arguments, like "no matter how they treat us, those who would hold us captive are always tyrants." Do you feel like the story comes down on one side or the other of those statements, or that you do?

BKV: It seems like everyone who's read Pride has a different reaction to it, and that's nice. I guess I'm always reluctant to talk about my own beliefs, because I don't want people to read the book as that. That line is coming from Noor, who's the younger revolutionary—she's sort of a stand-in for the people who would've been, even before the Americans showed up, thinking, "it's our responsibility; if someone's going to take down Saddam, it should be us." But I think it's telling that she's having an argument at that point with Safa, who's the older lion who remembers life in the wild—"life in the wild" sort of being life before Saddam. Safa remembers the lack of security, she remembers being raped in the wild; I think she thought the price of stability was worth it. Am I Safa or am I Noor? It's not really interesting which side I'm on, more that both sides are having that debate.

PWCW: What are the positions the other two lions, Zill and Ali, represent?

BKV: Zill would be the benevolent opportunist—"I don't care if the Americans are in charge [or] if Saddam is in charge—is my electricity on today? Is my family safe today? Do I have a job today?" Were I living in Iraq, that's probably where I and, I think, most people would fall. And Ali is the one lion who doesn't know life outside of captivity—he's one of the children of Iraq who didn't know a life outside of Saddam, so it's impossible to explain this abstract idea of life outside of the zoo to them.

PWCW: You're working on possible films for both Y and Ex Machina. Are there any other projects in the works?

BKV: One of the other reasons I wanted to do Pride of Baghdad is that it's very flattering when people say, "Oh, Y is so cinematic," or "When's Ex Machina going to be a movie?" But for me, comics are my first passion. I didn't start to do either of those as glorified screenplays, and I really wanted to do something that could only be a comic book. I imagine perhaps you could do an animated version of Pride of Baghdad, but the subject matter is so controversial that you'd never be able to spend that much money on it. I don't think it would've been nearly as effective without Niko's art—you couldn't do it as just a novel. So Pride of Baghdad is hopefully only ever going to be a graphic novel.

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